Author: Paul Deaton

Categories
Writing

Weekly Journal 2024-03-31

Early Virginia map.

It is difficult to grasp that one fourth of the year is gone. Days gallop by and run into each other. It is an acceleration I neither prompted nor enjoy. This week’s journal is a bit of hodge-podge. Sometimes that’s how the words fall.

Chapters

One of my early autobiography readers recommended breaking the narrative into chapters. This has been the single most useful piece of advice I received. With chapters, the stream of consciousness style – emulating Jack Kerouac – is parceled into understandable bits suitable for people with shorter attention spans. Likewise, it enables me to consolidate writing about specific topics in one place as appropriate. With chapters I have a better understanding of where the narrative is and is going. It will enable me to determine what’s missing and what needs cutting. Part I stands at 67,271 words, Part II at 60,950.

With that in mind, I plan to push through spring and summer to finish Part I, the story leading to 1982. If all goes well, I’ll self-published that part in early 2025.

Reading more, retaining less

I am reading more yet retaining less of what I read. I don’t like it. I have a shelf of recently read books and only a few scenes in a small number of them stand out. Not sure what, if anything, to do about that.

Reading 25 pages per day is a first priority. I make coffee, tend to chores and then read. My reading habits go way back. Here is an excerpt from my autobiography.

When I was an altar boy at Holy Family Church, Monsignor Barnes influenced me, although I didn’t realize it at the time. He taught me to structure things, with the most memorable advice being about reading. He said, set aside a goal in reading. Read 50 pages each day and stick to your goal. I have not followed that advice religiously, and lapsed in my reading, yet it became part of me, continuing into my seventies.

Unpublished autobiography.

There may be a self-improvement project in this. Unlike many, I won’t give up on reading.

The Jacob’s Ladder

In my quest to read one more book in March, I headed to my poetry shelves and picked Denise Levertov’s The Jacob’s Ladder. I wrote a brief review: “These poems are rooted in a post-war ecosystem of ideas, images, and language. As such, they are a snapshot of that period, and less relevant to the sensibilities of the third decade of the 21st Century. I don’t regret reading them. Some images stand out, especially in the namesake poem. Returning to them seems unlikely.” So it goes. Seven books read in March.

Disposing of Old Medicine

I took some old medicine to the United Methodist Church where pharmacy students from university would dispose of it. As I opened the door, about 15 sets of eyes greeted me, saying I was their first person. I felt obligated to sit down and talk about vitamins and medicine I am taking. It would have been rude to just drop my pills and leave.

The discussion went on to nutrition, dietary practices, sweet corn in the area, gardening, grocery shopping, everything a gardener would have to say about life. They offered choice of gifts and I picked a pill splitter over the multiple pill planning devices. They asked permission to use a photograph with me in it. I said okay.

Green Up

Leaves are budding on lilacs, fruit trees, and all around. Spring flowers pushed through the surface of the soil and flower buds have formed on some of them. This is a period of hope and promise. A cyclical explosion of greenery for which I’m ready.

The first time I heard the phrase “green up” was in the motion picture The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, based on the book of the same name, written by John Fox Jr. It is set near Big Stone Gap, Virginia, about 17 miles from Glamorgan where Father was born.

“I’ve been talking to your pappy,” Dave Tolliver said. “We’s going to get married.”

“When?” queried his cousin June Tolliver.

“Hog killing time. Your pappy has invited all the Tollivers. The whole kit and boodle of them.”

“I ain’t marrying till green up,” June Tolliver said. “Spring’s always the time to do them things. Then it’ll be next green up and the next. I don’t feel nothing.”

The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, Paramount Pictures, March 13, 1936.

Despite the speed with which time flies, I am leading a decent life. Decent enough to write about it a while longer. Thanks for reading.

Categories
Living in Society

Women To Read And Follow

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

According to the website Wordsrated, the average American adult reads five books per year. 51.6 percent of Americans don’t finish a single book in a year. Therefore, I am pretty optimistic when I say we should be reading these eight female authors. Don’t get me wrong. Men can be fine writers. It’s just that these women are particularly relevant to this moment in history when authoritarianism is knocking at American’s door.

Jane Mayer If you read only one book this year, make it Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. From the dust jacket: “…a network of exceedingly wealthy people with extreme libertarian views bankrolled a systemic, step-by-step plan to alter the American political system.”

Nancy MacLean Ever hear of James McGill Buchanan? Maybe not but you should learn about his influence in altering the rules of democratic governance. MacLean tells this story in Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America.

Naomi Oreskes Beginning with Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, Oreskes and co-author Erik M. Conway analyzed issues related to advertising and deceiving the public for private gain. Their latest book, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market is timely and relevant. Oreskes also wrote Why Trust Science?

Alice Miranda Ollstein Ollstein is a health care reporter for POLITICO, covering Capitol Hill. Her beat includes women’s reproductive rights and she is at the top of the game in covering the issue. Follow her here.

Anne Nelson Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. From the dust jacket: “This chilling story of the covert group masterminding the radical right’s ongoing assault on America’s airwaves, schools, environment, and, ultimately, its democracy.”

Dahlia Lithwick Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America is the story of women lawyers from around the country, independently of each other, fighting the good fight to hold the line as Trump, McConnell, and the Republican party did everything in their power to remake the judiciary in their own conservative image.

Barbara McQuade Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America, comes at a perfect time for this presidential election year. It is relevant, engaging, and necessary in its discussion of misinformation and disinformation in American society. It is part explainer and part map for addressing these issues. You’ll want to read this one straight through.

Elizabeth Cronise McLaughlin One of the co-founders of Indivisible, McLaughlin is a former New York Attorney (a federal court securities fraud litigator) who is covering the Trump trials and other relevant legal news from her home in Southern California. A main activity is her daily 30-minute YouTube broadcast called #ResistanceLive. Find it here. Not only does she report and interpret the news from a progressive viewpoint, she is funny, energetic, and intelligent. She encourages viewers to get involved with the 2024 election.

Please enter a comment with authors you believe progressives should be reading. You may be tempted to read some male authors and that’s fine… after you read these women.

To get involved with the Iowa Democratic Party, click here.

Categories
Living in Society

Dream Big, Get To Work

Is today a once in a lifetime chance to remake the nation? I know one thing. Elizabeth Cronise McLaughlin is right, Democrats need to dream big and get to work. What does that mean?

Iowa Democrats cannot resign themselves to the idea Iowa is a red state, or that Republican control of state government is inevitable. Republicans are in charge now and they haven’t always been. They will unlikely always be. The dream for Democrats is to make substantial progress toward retaking control of our government, culminating with voting Governor Kim Reynolds out of office in 2026. While we are at it, we could get rid of Attorney General Brenna Bird and other Republican statewide elected officials. I’m laying that marker down. Democrats in control after the 2026 general election.

What does “get to work” mean? Accept that elections matter and regardless of what small part we play in them, do more than simply vote. There are plenty of ways to get involved in campaigns, beginning with talking to reluctant voters in your family and contacting the local Democratic Party to volunteer.

I expressed my concerns about conventional campaigning last August. This post is not about that. This post is about a special election this week to the Alabama state legislature where Democrat Marilyn Lands won by 28 points in a district that voted for Trump in 2020. Lands made abortion rights and access to in vitro fertilization major themes of her campaign. She serves as an example that flipping a red district is possible.

Can we “remake the nation into a radically more just and equitable one from top to bottom,” as McLaughlin suggested? This may be our defining moment, yet only if we can recognize the hope and possibility it presents. Only if we roll up our sleeves and get to work.

I have faith the people of Iowa will rise up and reject Republican posturing to do what is right for Iowa and the nation. Winning is possible if we dream big and get to work.

Here is a link to the Iowa Democratic Party to get involved today.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Fertilizer Day

Marker for the now defunct Dillon’s Furrow.

Back when Iowa was a territory, a fellow named Lyman Dillon plowed a furrow from Iowa City to Dubuque so travelers could find their way from one city to the other. Iowa City was designated the territorial capitol in 1839, and Dubuque was a center of commerce, notably for fur trading, lumber, and lead mining. I stopped at the only marker I know and took this photo while enroute along the former Dillon’s Furrow. I went to Monticello to buy garden fertilizer.

Midwestern BioAg distributes bagged, composted chicken manure which many friends use in organic farming operations. I bought 150 pounds for $57.78. It should last through the growing season. I don’t know their process, but this stuff is the best in terms of ease of handling and results.

Farmers have been out in gigantic fields preparing the ground for row crops. Monticello is in Jones County where my spouse’s ancestors farmed after the Civil War. A family cemetery is within spitting distance of Highway 151 near Langworthy. It is a small farm community cemetery where cattle had gotten inside the fence and knocked down some of the grave markers.

If I plant potatoes on Good Friday (today), I’ll need the fertilizer. I’m ready to start digging soil. We’ll see if frost is out of the ground later today.

Categories
Living in Society

20 Influential Books

Since I threw in with a bunch of readers, artists, photographers, and writers on social media, I’m learning a lot about being “social” in that context. Mainly, we have to interact or what’s the point? I also try to say positive things when I do comment about a piece of writing, painting, photograph or whatnot.

There are games. One of them was to post as follows:

The challenge is to choose 20 books that greatly influenced you. One book per day, for 20 consecutive days. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. (Unless you ask…)

Recurring meme on Threads. March 16, 2024.

I’m going to try this and see if it yields engagement. Positive engagement is what social media is all about. NOT in order of importance, but in the order I posted them:

  • Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow.
  • The White Album by Joan Didion.
  • The Politics of History by Howard Zinn.
  • Spring and All by William Carlos Williams.
  • A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving.
  • The Actualist Anthology edited by Morty Sklar and Darrell Gray.
  • Joy of Cooking by Irma Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker.
  • The Photographer’s Eye by John Szarkowski.
  • The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois.
  • Dubliners by James Joyce.
  • Adventures: Rhymes and Designs by Vachel Lindsay.
  • Complete Poems by Carl Sandburg.
  • Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective by New York Museum of Modern Art.
  • The End of the World as We Know It by Donald Kaul.
  • An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace by Tamar Adler.
  • The Interpretation of Cultures by Clifford Geertz.
  • Lake Wobegon Days by Garrison Keillor.
  • The Assault on Reason by Al Gore.
  • What Is Cinema? by Andre Bazin.
  • I Seem To Be A Verb by R. Buckminster Fuller, et. al.

Editor’s Note: I posted through the 13th photo and this project is something of a fizzle. Threads views began minimally and decreased from there. I will finish out the series, but won’t try it again.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Early Spring Chills

Black bean and kale taco filling.

With ambient temperatures in the twenties and thirties it has been a chilly early spring, of a kind that has me lingering indoors to find things to do. It is what it is. I hope to plant potatoes on Friday, yet if it’s too cold, I will delay. In the life cycle of Midwestern gardening, the growing season is extended by a warming climate and a few days doesn’t matter that much.

I plant potatoes in containers so the soil is less accessible to rodents. I move them each year, using the soil dug to bury them plus some soil mix and compost all blended with a cup or so of fertilizer in each tub. So far no critters dug their way into the tubs to eat the tubers.

A company in Monticello sells composted chicken manure, which is used by a lot of organic growers. I need to get over there and buy this year’s supply which is 150 pounds. There will likely be the annual discussion of which sales person gets credit for my sale. A few years ago we established that mine is a “house account” which means no sales person gets credit as I just walk into the office to buy it. Since beginning to use fertilizer, garden yields have improved.

Based on last year’s experience, I delayed planting peppers last weekend. Timing of seeding to planting time is more important for peppers and tomatoes. Any more, I don’t see an advantage of germinating early. I am cutting back on peppers and tomatoes this year with fewer varieties. For peppers to be successful in this climate, I need to install drip irrigation. I have been unwilling to do so, and there is an abundance of peppers when they come in around the county. I do plan to plant the varieties that grow well with my sparing watering.

I inspected the garlic and it is looking quite good. Taking time to loosen the straw mulch compacted over winter facilitated growth. It looks to be another great harvest.

When the weather finally breaks, there will be a lot of outdoors work to do. I am ready for it, even if there is plenty of indoors work to keep me busy.

Categories
Writing

50 Years of Letters

Writing desk circa 1980.

I wrote my first letter to the editor of a newspaper in 1974, so I’m approaching my 50th anniversary of letter writing. What do I make of this?

I appreciate the editors of the Cedar Rapids Gazette for publishing a daily letters section. Fewer daily papers do that in 2024, if they even remained in business.

Before social media rose to fill our every need to chat, the Gazette rose to become a dominant Iowa newspaper by circulation. To a letter writer, that means a reach of more than 30,000 subscribers. Social media can’t compare to that for everyday folk like me.

The Gazette’s readers are engaged. I get feedback about my letters from community members in person, via email, and on social media posts. Over the years I had my share of anonymous hate mail based on something I wrote. A letter writer seeks such engagement if nothing else.

Finally, the opinion page editors will reject a letter that is poorly worded, or overcome by events. They exercise a gentle editor’s hand which improves my original composition. I rarely complain about editors and usually accept their edits as reasonable.

Who knows how long I will continue to write? I’m sure some have had enough of my opinions. In a society that is increasingly complex, where more people are having opinions, letters to the editor remain an important part of public dialogue.

I wrote 50 years worth. Now it’s your turn.

~ Published in the March 29, 2024 edition of the Cedar Rapids Gazette.

Categories
Living in Society

Weekly Journal 2024-03-24

First Starbucks purchase in many years.

Last week was a time of planning, events, and appointments. Because I had fasting labs before blood work on Thursday, I had a headache after the appointment. By the time I arrived at a local grocer and bought Starbucks at their in-store kiosk it was 9:22 a.m. That’s the longest I’ve gone without morning coffee in years.

Coffee cost $2.81 for a tall, which with tip came to $4. Expensive, yet I had to have it… immediately. No typical pleasantries discussed at Starbucks, things like unionization, Palestine, Ukraine, approach to supply chain management, workers’ rights, human rights, political activities, anti-social finance, tax conduct, palm oil sourcing, factory farming, or animal rights. Just coffee, any coffee. I was feeling better after getting groceries and driving home.

Rural Political Gathering

Also on Thursday, I attended a meet up at Shuey’s Restaurant and Lounge in Shueyville. It was one of a series of informal political happy hours held throughout the county. This one had a number of public office-holders and candidates, including the mayor of Shueyville, the county sheriff, and one county supervisor. In fact, folks up for election and their entourages outnumbered us locals.

The reason I went was to meet our state senate candidate Ed Chabal, promote an event we seek to hold in the City of Solon before the primary election, and get caught up with friends and contacts. I had not been to the venue previously and found it modern and perfect for a gathering of this sort. I believe they recently remodeled after a fire.

In Johnson County the primary for supervisor is usually more important than the fall general election. There are five Democratic candidates for three supervisor positions this cycle with incumbents Rod Sullivan, Royceann Porter, and Lisa Green-Douglass facing newcomers Mandi Remington and Bob Conrad. Green-Douglass and Remington were present at the event. I keep hearing echoes of problems with the group dynamic at supervisor meetings, yet haven’t paid enough attention to what’s going on.

There was an action initiated by some elected officials for the county central committee to censure the county attorney for following the law in the prosecution of some protesters. That went nowhere, except to make a kerfuffle. However, the bigger issue, one on which I believe the primary should be decided, is about building a new jail.

Johnson County has needed a new jail for a long time. The current jail opened in 1981 with a 46-inmate capacity. With doubling up prisoners, capacity is 92. We have more prisoners than space, and spend more in housing excess prisoners in other county jails than it would cost to build a new jail. With jail diversion programs and other initiatives between the county attorney and sheriff, the overall jail population reduced substantially. The condition of the jail is not what is needed.

In this you have the rift on how county funds should be spent. There are two supervisors who seem likely to oppose any initiatives by the sheriff. If the election yields a third… well, that would be that regarding a new jail. The supervisor race is still germinating in the primordial soup from which campaigns will emerge. Stay tuned.

Good Health

Over the weekend it began sinking in that my glucose level and LDL cholesterol number are within normal range. That’s the first time since I began seeing a practitioner for my condition. My A1C remains below seven, so that’s good, too. Diet and exercise is helping prevent diabetes in my case. Aging is inescapable and we do the best we can.

Check in tables at the county convention.

County Convention

The county convention was held at City High, an old, well-maintained school which I don’t recall previously visiting. Democrats are getting better at conventions as this one finished up before 2 p.m., platform and all.

There continue to be a number of old-timers in attendance. At the same time there are many younger faces. I had not planned on doing so, yet I signed up to be a delegate to the District and State conventions. The District convention is just across the lakes from me, and my spouse can visit family in Des Moines while I am at the convention there. We fell one short of the allocated number of delegates to these conventions so I’m glad I volunteered.

This week is Good Friday and my potatoes are cut and cured. There will be exercise involved with planting them: more than I am used to experiencing. Make it a great week!

Categories
Reviews

Book Review: Attack From Within

We need information that will help us cope with the 2024 political campaigns and facilitate Democratic wins. Barbara McQuade’s new book has the potential to do that.

McQuade is a law school professor and legal analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. A former US Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, she was appointed the first female in that position by President Obama. She possesses legal bona fides. She also co-hosts a podcast called Sisters In Law.

She is one of several combination authors/lawyers/talking heads/podcasters I follow. Her new book, Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America, comes at a perfect time for this presidential election year. It is relevant, engaging, and necessary. What is it about?

In part, the book is an explainer. McQuade pulls commonly known information from the media ecosphere and relates it to the concept of disinformation, demonstrating the potential and real consequences for American Democracy. She presents a coherent narrative that includes how disinformers gain power, disinformation tactics, why disinformation works, the danger of emerging technologies, and more. For those parts of the book alone it is worth reading.

What I found most engaging was the chapter “We Alone Can Fix It: Proposed Solutions.” Dealing with disinformation and misinformation can be daunting. McQuade compares this task to the moon shot during the Kennedy administration and wrote:

The tandem threats of authoritarianism and disinformation can seem overwhelming, but we as a nation have solved big problems before. The stakes for democracy are simply too high to ignore them or surrender to despair. Unless we take action, democracy in the Unites States seems destined to fail, and our sovereignty as citizens will perish with it.

Attack From Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America by Barbara McQuade, page 249.

In this chapter, McQuade turns from describing the problems with disinformation to potential solutions. Free speech protections are not absolute in the United States, she said. We should be seeking regulatory solutions to misinformation and disinformation rather than simply banning content. She asserted this can be done without implicating censorship concerns. That may seem like a difficult needle to thread, yet it is the approach taken by other western governments like Germany and the European Union.

Another idea is related to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. I have frequently bemoaned loss of enforcement of the Fairness Doctrine under President Reagan, yet there may be a different solution. “Making online media companies legally responsible for the content on their platforms would force them to remove posts that endanger the public,” McQuade wrote. This issue is at the heart of the Supreme Court case Murthy v. Missouri for which the high court heard oral arguments on March 18. This approach is not without problems. A discussion is needed to discover a way to balance stripping some protections from legal liability while continuing to make reforms in how online content is regulated. It doesn’t have to be a free-for-all. My sense is the high court will decide this case on narrow grounds and throw it to the legislative branch of government to be addressed. The days of having discussions like these at the Supreme Court, as was done in deciding Roe v. Wade, are over with the Roberts Court.

My advice? Secure a copy of the book, by buying it or asking your public library to get a copy, and read it. I’m missing some things in a short book review, but believe me, you are going to want it all from Barbara McQuade.

Categories
Living in Society

Driveway Politics

Rural Polling Place

I’m supposed to be taking it easy. When I retired during the coronavirus pandemic I knew outside activities would wind down as I age. I still care about our politics, yet in a different way from before the pandemic.

It began April 28, 2020 when I gave up a part-time job at the home, farm, and auto supply store. I also left work at a friend’s farm, and at the orchard. I gave up my veterans group and all my volunteer board memberships. The only activities remaining are this blog (which I’ll keep for now), writing letters to the editors of newspapers, and politics. I’d prefer to dump politics as an active concern, yet it doesn’t seem possible because it runs in my blood.

My cohort of local political activists is diminished through deaths, infirmities, aging, and people moving away. I am reluctant to engage my nonagenarian friends who have been mainstays in campaigns. Octogenarians get similar consideration. Younger people moving into our precinct lean conservative. Republican candidates won federal and statewide campaigns here beginning in 2016. Democratic politics as I have been practicing it since 1987 is fading away.

I continue to do things.

A friend returned from a trip to Thailand and we had a driveway conversation about it. We first worked together on a political campaign in 2004, so I’ve known them 20 years. We looked at photos and videos on a handheld device. One video had them swimming in a river with a five-year-old elephant. It was good to catch up.

The reason for the reunion was to collect signatures on an Iowa House candidate’s nominating petition. We have been working together so long, we speak to each other in shorthand about politics. Between us, on short notice, we collected 11 signatures. The candidate had more than the 50 required by the Secretary of State.

Later that day, another friend stopped by to pick up the petitions and deliver them to the candidate. We had a long conversation in the driveway. I know his father and the three of us all worked on Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. Those were heady times. I wrote a post about this in 2008. We talked about the House District and who we might pull in to work on the campaign. This cycle, I plan to be a worker bee, not an organizer. I think people have heard just about enough from me. There is interest in doing better in the new district.

Driveway conversations don’t occur in a vacuum. If anything, they generate more interest and activities. Now that the filing deadline for state and federal offices passed, there is a sense the campaign has begun. It truly has and that means doing more things. For example, this week there was an informal political meet up in our House District and today is the county convention. This was a lot more talking than I have done in a very long time. Partly I welcome it. Partly, I am wary of it. The reasons are complicated.

The 2020 campaign was a bitch because of the coronavirus. The Sunday before the general election a neighbor held an event for Rita Hart who was running for the Congressional seat Dave Loebsack left open after retirement. She was standing right next to me and I didn’t recognize her. We were both wearing face masks. As we talked, it didn’t occur to me she was the candidate. That was one more wacky thing during the coronavirus campaign. The pandemic changed campaign operations dramatically. In a sense, there is no going back to the pre-pandemic methods. Hart lost in a close race.

It is early in the 2024 campaign, so we’ll see how Democrats roll. Today’s county convention should be a bellwether. As long as I don’t get too far from our driveway, I keep my wits about me. When I do leave for an in real life event, my only imperative is to recruit volunteers so we stand a chance to turn Republicans out of office in our district and beyond. Also, I continue to hear the siren song of Democratic politics.

~ Written for Blog for Iowa